


to walk to where you are sleeping

by fluffernutter8



Category: Agent Carter (TV), Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Grief/Mourning, Steggy Week 2018, tenuous connection with facts/reality even though I now know a lot about Greenland
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-19
Updated: 2018-07-19
Packaged: 2019-06-12 19:32:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15347091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluffernutter8/pseuds/fluffernutter8
Summary: Peggy goes searching for Steve.





	to walk to where you are sleeping

The woman who owns the grocery on Peggy’s corner was born at just the wrong time. Her father was a cruel man before he came back shell-shocked from the First World War and she married young to leave his house. Her husband was also young, a good, strong man who took over the store from his uncle and worked to support her and the twin sons they had when they were barely twenty. He was just under the age for army induction when he was drafted but he didn’t plead that he was too old. He was fit and strong - he never paid a delivery fee if he could possibly walk supplies to the store himself - and they inducted him. He stayed stateside; his death was a training accident. One of the twins joined the navy, one the army, but there was no safety on land or sea. Peggy hadn’t watched the three blue stars turn gold in the window, but her eyes catch on the flag every time she passes by.

“Yes, I suppose they would,” the woman says, mopping her eyes when Peggy tells her this. She gives a little laugh. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to tell you all of this. I just thought you seemed as if you would understand.”

And the woman’s pain lives in Peggy so easily that she has to smile and make excuses to rush away. Because she didn’t lose a husband, she didn’t lose any children. She lost a good man who she might have someday, or in another life, married. But no matter how she tries to tell herself that it doesn’t compare, she does understand the entirety of that grief with a precision that shocks her.

“Enough is enough,” she tells herself most mornings, when she wakes up gritty-eyed and already teary from dreaming. “Enough is enough,” when she wants to tell Steve about her day, when she spots hair like his from the corner of her eye, when she has another lonely cup of tea at her table, when she wants just a bit of his optimism to drive her onward. “It was two years out of more than twenty, it is time to be done with mourning, enough is enough.”

And then one night she opens her eyes into the darkness of her bedroom and tells herself, “Enough.”

She takes an indefinite leave from the SSR. Chief Dooley barely conceals a snort when she hands over the letter, and Jack Thompson can’t stop his grin and lifted eyebrows as she walks out the door. She’ll almost certainly be out of a job if she ever comes back. All her careful plans cast aside with equally great care, but she is done feeling emptied behind the eyes. She goes to find Howard.

* * *

Howard hates the idea. He's already spent a month combing the ocean floor with his detectors, his eagerly-sprung technology, and he’ll go back next year: it’s already penciled into his calendar sometime in July or maybe August, just ask Jarvis to check.

But Peggy isn’t planning on making a summer jaunt out of it. She needs Steve, and she’s going to find him. She knows Howard doubts that they’ll ever be able to find him, to place him in a grave, and weep until the wound sews itself right up. “I wasn’t looking to go together,” she tells him, “and I was only asking for permission to use your equipment as a courtesy.” They both know that she means that she could have simply stolen his devices instead.

“Fine,” he says, as if they’re actually making an agreement, “you can have the stuff. And I’ve got a good boat you can use, but you’ll have to find your own crew. The military doesn’t like me stealing their officers anymore.”

“That’s alright. I have some ideas about that.”

* * *

She talks to a librarian, a sociologist, a doctor, an old friend who moved to Norway after the war. It takes longer than she wants it to, but she assembles a crew. They think she’s an eccentric millionaire looking for some strange treasure in the most unlikely places. They’ve got it half right.

She sits with a mathematics professor and charts the most likely courses based on the point of takeoff and the wreckage that they’ve found of the smaller pods, as well as the tesseract. “I’ve got to put her in the water,” Steve had said, and that gives Peggy hope. As clearly dreadful as he had been at piloting aircraft, it meant that he at least would not be in the uninhabited center of Greenland. It narrowed the search to two categories: the Arctic, the smallest of the planet’s oceans, or somewhere on land close to the coast. Still a daunting affair, but good work, Steve.

Although Howard has been sworn to secrecy, as Peggy goes down to the boat, she almost expects to find some of the Commandos waiting for her alongside the three men from her crew. There’s only Mr. Jarvis, looking dubious, with a large picnic basket in hand.

“Safe travels,” he says, and they’re off.

Peggy pushes the speed and they make it up to Greenland in four days. They meet up there with the remainder of their crew: a Norwegian, a Dane, and a native Greenlander with an excellent reputation as both a sailor and a translator.

They cycle through one month on the boat full-time, combing the waters, weaving around the island edges. Howard’s sensors seem to work perfectly, but find nothing. The fact that Peggy has maps and checklists, columns marking goals and attempts, makes no difference. She wants one thing and he is hidden in five million miles of nothingness.

The month after is spent on Greenland proper, moving along the populated coastal areas. The influenza epidemic reached the people here at the lonely top of the world, and the war did too. Someone will have spotted the Valkyrie going down, the strange size and shape, the deliberate plunge seemingly without cause.

She’d chosen her crew for their experience and based on reports of their personalities. They’re middle-aged, mostly quiet men, experienced, more at home at sea than in their houses. They don’t much seem to care that they’re using strange instruments and combing the sea floor instead of fishing or hauling cargo, and it’s not necessarily because she - or some of Stark Industries smaller patents - is paying them well. She has the feeling that if she told them that she wanted to find Atlantis or an ocean gold mine or that she’d heard that this was the real resting place of the Titanic, they would only shrug and acquiesce and think, “What does it matter to me?”

After a month spent moving up the coast starting at Nuuk, they restock and return to the water. The endlessness of it does not frighten Peggy, nor discourage her. Her mission was never about faith or fervor, it was about desperation, and that only drives her onward when she thinks of what they’re trying to accomplish.

Peggy wears clothes that she picked up at the army surplus store. She remembers her delight at being able to wear civilian clothes again - pretty, patterned dresses, carefully selected suits and slacks, not to mention real stockings - but somehow the drab clothing feels comforting, feels more real than her happy memories. She does keep one pair of silk pajamas and four small bottles of nail varnish on hand for when she needs to break the monotony.

The cycle on and off land continues for ten months. Peggy gets to know her crew a bit, to understand and differentiate between their individual silences. She picks up some Greenlandic and learns to appreciate suaasat no matter what type of meat is filling it out. She sends letters back to New York, but is rarely in the right place for a response. She dreams memories of the war and frantic things that are the war also. She dreams of Steve curled up, sleeping peacefully with his eyes widely, horribly open. On some nights, she dreams of rocking, open water.

And then, at Ammassalik, just before she will have to release her crew or choose to start her circle again, an older man hears her questions and says, “Oh, I thought someone might be looking.”

The man and his granddaughter had been walking home, just around sunset. “Look,” the little girl had said, “that is a very big bird!”

“Where did it land?” Peggy asks, trying to sound polite instead of as if she wanted to grab him by the collar. She feels alert in the same jagged way as she does when she’s been without sleep for several nights in a row.

He points. “Up the coast. I can make a guess, perhaps draw a map for you.”

“I would appreciate that, thank you,” and she waits until he realizes that she’d like to see the map now.

The man she hires to take her by dog sled is less happy than the ship crew to take direction from a strange woman. They don’t need the translator or their cobbled together pieces of language to make their points of view understood. But Peggy thinks that in the end, there’s an uncrossable look in her eye that defies language as well.

After two weeks spent sweeping back and forth over the area, Peggy’s brain feels blank and blind. The sameness of it all, the ice and snow, is terrifying (how easy to become lost and turn in frozen circles forever) until one day, the lead dog stops and barks at something in the distance.

It is a large hunk of metal, sticking out of more recently accumulated snow and ice.

“What were you looking for again?” the musher asks suspiciously.

“A plane,” Peggy tells him mindlessly. “It’s military, very valuable.” He can scavenge through Schmidt’s smashed and icy technology all he likes. Howard has the tesseract, and she…she will have… “We need to find a telephone.”

* * *

She chooses Howard instead of Phillips, because although there are closer US Army bases than offices of Stark Industries, she wants to have control. She doesn’t want to glimpse Steve for half a minute only to have him whisked off to some government lab. She wants to pick a suit for him and a quote for the headstone, to make sure the only people who come for the service are the ones who actually care.

For the first time she wonders if perhaps this entire enterprise was selfish. Perhaps Steve went into the ice glad that there would be no opportunity here for grave-robbing or samples taken of his body. But then they bring Steve up, still, encased, and she can’t care. He is here, he is here: what fragile and disturbing joy.

Howard comes to oversee the team himself, and though he assures her that he’s chosen only the best, all trusted professionals, he stands over everyone’s shoulders barking, “Careful!” and “He’s a human being, not a snowball!”

There’s a plane waiting to take them back to New York. Howard’s engaged a pilot; the freezing area is delicate and it will apparently be easier to fly back to the city with Howard maintaining things and take care of all the preparations of Steve’s body there.

“I’ll see you in a few days,” Peggy tells Howard. They’ve already had the argument several times, but Peggy will return to New York the way she left it: on the boat that’s become hers, with the crew that she pulled together, only with a feeling of peace, of readiness. She’s finished what she came to do, and, surely, things will be better now.

They sail into the harbor four days later. Peggy’s washed her face and put on fresh lipstick and a smart suit. Her faithfully durable clothes are tucked sadly in a trunk - she wanted to look presentable as she took the crew for a beer before they set off.

Except that the figure pacing the dock clarifies as they get closer, and Peggy recognizes Howard, his overcoat flapping.

There’s a look on his face that has her rushing to step off and grabbing the meat of his arm. “What is it?” she demands.

“We never thought— Erskine never said—” Howard stammers. Peggy stares, alarmed. “It’s Steve. We started defrosting him and we found a pulse.” Her stare paralyzes. “He just...he woke up! I’m not saying he’s good as new yet, but—” His laugh is joyous, but too giddy, too loud. He looks as if he hasn’t slept since she last saw him. “He’s alive, Peggy. Steve’s alive.”

How strange. She’s left Greenland far behind, and she is overcome by a chill.

* * *

They do allow her to return to the SSR. She hadn’t thought the tasks assigned to her could be more pointless and demeaning, but they manage it. Perhaps it’s a punishment for leaving so abruptly. Perhaps they think that she’s proven herself unreliable and deserves no more of the scraps of respect they had once tossed her way.

For doing nothing all day, using no adrenaline at all, chasing no criminals and discovering no leads, she comes home exhausted. She had told Colleen to find a new roommate before she left, so when she’d returned, Peggy instead found a tiny room for rent at the top of a house which had been chopped into apartments. In other circumstances, perhaps she would have told herself that she was living in a snug and exotic garret. As it is, she mostly finds the temperature to be unsuitable at all times and the toilet inconveniently located.

She has mail, as is always the case these days. She puts together a sandwich and has two cups of tea with the envelope staring at her before she opens it.

_Dear Peggy,_

_Last night I got to go out with Dum Dum. He made me get a beer, even though there are a dozen drinks I would have preferred because I think that beer tastes like sour piss that they trick people into paying money for (apparently including me) and I can’t even get drunk from it. Dum bet himself that he couldn’t drink five in ten minutes and got absolutely pickled. Luckily, the bartender’s apparently familiar with our friend and pulled out a tray of soft pretzels out of the oven just as things were getting hairy. They’re apparently good at soaking up liquor, at least if you’re Dugan. Have you ever had a soft pretzel freshly baked? I hope so._

_This morning I got to go over to Bucky’s. Mrs. Barnes dug out my mother’s old cookbook. It probably mostly still belongs to my Grandmother Malone, who put it in the suitcase when Ma was leaving for New York, because Ma wasn’t much of a cook - she didn’t like it too well, and didn’t really have the time. But when there was a birthday or a holiday or a party that she was around for, and we could afford it, she’d make the family recipe apple cake with custard on top. I found the instructions right in the center of the book. I think she got custard on her fingers when she made it once, because there are prints all along the edge of the page. If I can get up the courage, I think I’ll try my hand at it one of these days._

_I hope you’re doing well._

_Thank you._

_Steve_

She reads the letter twice, letting it sink in. She notes his quaint formality, as if he were still basing his writing on the advice of his grammar school teacher, thinking too that if she had even overheard him say the word “piss” to one of the boys, he’d have blushed and apologized for three days.

He always opens the letters with a recounting of what he’s done, always phrasing it the same way: “I got to…” Sometimes what he’s gotten to do is small (put fresh sheets on his bed, go to the park) and sometimes it’s mundane (finding a new place to live, replacing his library card) and sometimes it sounds enormous (he’d gone to Washington for debrief and to get himself turned back into a living person). Last week he told her he’d gotten to go to see the stone they put up for Bucky. _It was good quality, nice writing and a good quote_ , he wrote. _I hated it. And when I told Rebecca that, she said she agrees._

He always ends the letters the same way, too: _I hope you’re doing well. Thank you._

Finally, she refolds the letter and, setting it on the table, turns the envelope over into her hand. It’s socks again. He’s sent other things - a packet of good English tea, a set of nail varnishes in vibrant red, orange, yellow, and blue, a pair of nice leather gloves alongside some bold red woolen ones, both of which she’s been wearing in the cold weather - but mostly it’s socks. They’re all obviously handmade from soft, cozy materials, but he’s sent all different types: plain solids in a variety of colors, some simple patterns like plaids and stripes, and more elaborate designs than she would ever find in a store. Last week she got bright parrots and Union Jacks. Tonight it’s adorable little teapots and she gasps out a smile, bending over and placing a hand to her mouth automatically.

Eventually she stands, first intending to put the socks in with the rest of her growing collection, but then she lays them beside her nightgown instead. She wears them as she putters around later that night, tying a scarf around her hair and making certain the stain was fully taken out of the blouse she plans to wear tomorrow, curling her toes against the floorboards.

As she falls asleep, she thinks she’s murmured to herself, “Lovely, lovely.” But a whirlwind of a dream swallows her quickly up, and in the morning, she doesn’t remember.

* * *

She’d gone with Howard directly from the boat to see Steve. Much later, she remembered that there had been no arrangements made for her luggage and Howard didn’t have her new address.

One afternoon, although she doesn’t have room for the trunks in her new apartment, she goes to Howard’s to straighten things out. It seems the polite thing to do. Howard has gone jaunting off somewhere instead of making their appointment, but Mr. Jarvis is quite helpful. He’s apparently taken the liberty of cleaning, drying and repacking all of her things, and they can be delivered at her convenience.

Once she’s confirmed the details of the arrangement, she shakes Mr. Jarvis’s hand, thanks him for the long-ago picnic basket (he gives a vague sort of acceptance) and sees herself out. But on the other side of the door, his hand raised to knock, is Steve.

“Hello,” she says automatically.

“Hi.” He drops his hands so they look awkward and displaced. “I was here to see Howard.”

“He’s gone off somewhere.” Irritation with Howard is good: a neutral, normal piece of conversation.

“I guess I’ll just…” He gestures behind himself, the logical egress from the property, and Peggy realizes that there’s nothing else to do but walk down the driveway together.

After a quiet few moments, Steve says, “They told me you came while I was sleeping.”

“Yes.” She can’t say more. She can’t even bear to give him an apology for not being there when he woke up.

“Thank you for that, too.”

“You always end the letters by saying that.” She hadn’t meant to mention it, although she’s certainly been wondering. “You send endless socks, and you always thank me.”

“Of course.” He says it so plainly, but his hands go to curl into his pockets. “You left your job to look for me. You lived on a boat with strangers for almost a year. If you hadn’t, I don’t know how long…”

He stops speaking, stops walking, and looks away, and for the first time, Peggy feels as if the two of them, missing and missed, might understand the same type of pain.

“It wasn’t only for you,” she finds herself saying, frozen in the driveway and glad that he’s turned his face. “I hadn’t realized— I never—” She stops, takes a breath, reevaluates. “I hadn’t realized that it would hurt so much,” she ends with simply. “You being gone.”

“Is that why you never—?”

She looks around at Howard’s property, at the trees towering evergreen above them. “One day,” she says quietly, “you will die. Whether in a fight or an accident or only because you’re human, you will die, and if I saw you again, if I had to see it again, I don’t know that I could stand it.” She presses her lips together. “I had thought I would go find you, and it would settle everything. We could have a funeral and I could move on, finally leave the war behind. But you came back, and it just wasn’t that simple anymore.”

He could tell her that the Peggy Carter he knows would never have let something like fear stop her. He could tell her that grief was certainly hard, he knew that, but it was no excuse not to live. Instead what he says is, “I send you the socks because I thought your feet might be cold. Mine always are these days. I wanted you to have them because you went up there and froze your toes off so that both of us could have something better. You deserve your feet to be warm. And it may take a while, but I think one day they can be.”

She still talks to the men she served with. She sees former GIs every day at work. They trade memories about how terrible the food was, and about what a shame it is about the men they’d lost, and maybe they’ll go back one day, see the sights without gunfire in the way. But this is the first time she feels as if someone is reaching out a hand and telling her that she doesn’t need to put all that happened out of her mind and move to a new chapter. She watched so many good people die - not just Steve, not just her brother, but the boys who came from her home village, and the sweet air force pilot she’d kissed on the New Year of 1940, and the lady who’d sold ice cream through the Blitz and been suffocated by an improperly constructed Anderson shelter - and perhaps she doesn’t have to turn her grief out of doors and lock herself up.

Perhaps she can take some time to not be alright. Perhaps she can do it with someone else who might not be quite alright either.

It feels like a light clicking on, moving up her breastbone, illuminating her eyes.

“My feet,” she tells him, “haven’t been properly warm in about sixteen months.”

“Well,” he tells her, “I can always make you more socks.”

And without thinking about it, Peggy laughs. She laughs at the shy, serious look on his face and about how much her mother would like a man who thinks knitting can solve any problem. Peggy laughs, and Steve smiles to hear it. Peggy laughs, and she can feel it in her toes.

**Author's Note:**

> The prompt for day 4, was "Songs, Poems, and Quotes." I took my inspiration from Pablo Neruda, my favorite poet. I had read two pieces of his writing that didn't make me automatically think of Steve and Peggy, but did make me think that they could be part of their story.
> 
> 1\. _...so I wait for you like a lonely house_  
>  till you will see me again and live in me.  
> Till then my windows ache.
> 
> 2\. _But I love your feet_  
>  only because they walked  
> upon the earth and upon  
> the wind and upon the waters,  
> until they found me.
> 
> I was also interested in getting into some of Peggy's postwar grief. I think canonically she holds up admirably, both in regards to Steve's loss and the horrors of war in general. But as I wrote a version of Peggy so overcome by her loss of Steve that she leaves her life behind to search for him, I wondered if perhaps she wasn't also suffering from having served in a large and terrible military conflict. The title comes from another Neruda segment:  
>  _my feet will want to walk to where you are sleeping but_  
>  I shall go on living
> 
> That message applies to the Peggy we saw on Agent Carter and later in the Marvel universe: clearly in love with and deeply saddened by Steve's loss, but not overcome by it. The version I've clipped is the version written here: a Peggy who searches for Steve because she feels it's the only way to return to herself, only to realize that his death was not the only thing holding her back.


End file.
